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Thursday, March 31, 2011

The purpose of this blog is present the Concept Art I have done for Ship Breaker, a novel by Paolo Bacigalupi published by Little Brown and Company in 2010.
The objective in this project is create the world of Ship Breaker, breaking down the story visually, concentrating our work in the following tasks;
Story breakdown,design breakdown,storyboards,color breakdown,character design and environments compositions.

For better understanding of this project, we need to know that Ship Breaker is a Rusty, Dirty and oily story contextualized in a possible coming future, inspired by the Hurricane Katrina. Genetic mutations, violence, trash and dirty water surrounding this story were 2 worlds find a direct confrontation in a study of the moral fight between the good and bad behavior in a savage wild and sinister world in where Nailer, the teenager protagonist of this story has to survive.

For time reasons, in this project I concentrate my work in two areas. Trailer and vehicle design.
I compress the concept art in the trailer, developing the characters and environments from the action in the scene. In this way I can study the characters at different time in the story. Making their spectrum more rich.

The trailer is a synopsis from the story, in where the first part is linear with a slow rhythm speeding up at the end,and the second part is no linear, with flashbacks and fast rhythm evoking stress and danger. Telling to the audience part of the story but keeping the key moments hide. So we will know the characters and what they are doing but not how or when.

The software I use is Maya,Photoshop,AE,Premiere,CoolEdit and Found Forge.
I record the speech and edit the sound effects. The music is a mix between a selection I did from other commercial works.
Here is the trailer. Also with better quality in http://vimeo.com/21369645

I divide the story in 6 acts, each one has a different color spectrum dictated by the kind of event who dominate the story on each moment.
Inside each part we can see 3 division, corresponding with different actions in the scrip.All 3 grouped by the same act mood.
So this color spectrum will bring us the mental and physical dimension the characters suffer in each part of the story.
In the color wheel we can see in the center one picture representing one moment in this period of time grouping the colors who dominate that scene.
In the exterior part of the picture we can see the main light color's palette extracted from each image. In the exterior ring we have the main light color who control each part, and in the interior we can see the dark equivalent one.
In the center of the wheel we have one picture who represents all the book, a rusty metal plate. And the color around extracted from it. This color can have presence at any time in the story and will bring us the idea of the conflict's origin and the beginning the story, the Ship Breaker.
The two wheels on the right are for color correction purposes.

I have to give thanks to the people who collaborate with me in this project
helping me to give life to the characters with their voices: Kate Zhu, Sebastian Brown and Senad Ramovic. They have done a big effort I really appreciate.
And also Kenny Ming for compose some original soundtrack we couldn't include for time issues.
I also want to give thanks to Andrea Adams, for give me the opportunity to do this project with out her initiative and orientation this project would never exist.
Thanks for watching and I invite you to visit my web were there you can find other things I do. See you soon.
Diego Gonzalez http://www.diego-gonzalez.com/